Creative Association Parazit. Project Anniversary. Anti-apartment exhibition

The project was implemented with the assistance of the Committee for Culture of St. Petersburg

The project is dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the creative association PARAZIT, created by St. Petersburg artists on the basis of the Borey gallery. As part of the project, a large anniversary exhibition will be held.

Today, PARAZIT is one of the most striking creative initiatives in St. Petersburg, the most energy-intensive and, at the same time, stable. They are distinguished by openness and democracy in working with young novice colleagues and interactive work with the audience. This is a kind of creative laboratory where there is a mutually beneficial exchange of skill and experience with indefatigable young energy. Every two weeks in the main corridor of the Borey gallery, a group exposition on a given topic changes, which puts the artist in certain rigid frames, but does not limit the freedom in choosing the form of expression: painting, graphics, photography, collage, object, installation, video art - the whole arsenal of fine funds.

Over 15 years, vast experience has been accumulated, already highly appreciated by specialists, but still requiring reflection. Among the artists of the association there are famous masters whose works can be seen in the Russian Museum, winners of the Kandinsky Prize, theatrical award "Golden Mask", laureates of the State Prize "Innovation" in the field of contemporary art. With the basic composition of the group unchanged, every year a large number of young talents pass through this creative laboratory, the most vibrant and talented remain in the association.

“For our project ANNIVERSARY, it makes sense to create a semantic construct - what the house consists of - a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a toilet, a corridor, an entrance door, a back door. Childhood - Adolescence - Youth - Maturity. This is not an apartment - this is a diagram of the space where each hall has a function. Based on the scheme, you can understand each space and the strategy for working with it. One way or another, we always put up in the corridor, and the corridor is the vestibule, this is the entry point, this is the border zone, we don’t know how to behave at home in the hallway, whether to lock ourselves in the toilet from the household or take a sofa, or climb under the bed, or run around the apartment. Each line of behavior is possible and, if we consider us as parasites in the apartment, then there are also different behavioral strategies, cockroaches in the kitchen, mosquitoes in the bedroom, bugs in the sofa in the living room, flies in the toilet. The schematic of creative behavior in an apartment is determined more easily than the halls of the gallery, where space is united in its function. <…>

This is an apartment outside, this is a scruff of the neck, this is an anti-apartment exhibition where they celebrate the anniversary of their temporary stay. This project is about camouflage and mimicry - the dissolution of living space in the art of its inhabitants. Baranov-Rossine, one of the first camouflage developers, interpreted it as art, but then the functionality of camouflage was separated from art. We can investigate the question of the appropriateness of art in a human hole or in a human nest, this is a question addressed to ourselves, as residents of residential premises. "

Semyon Motolyanets
Creative Association PARAZIT